YOUTUBE REWIND 2018

Around this time each year, YouTube shares a year-end wrap video that it calls the ‘Rewind’. The video is supposed to take you back (almost) 365 days and highlight all the major moments through the year that stood apart from the rest.

But here’s the thing, when you think of this year’s trends what would you list in?

The nail-biting race between PewDiePie and T-Series to see who got the top spot, the split of the famous duo David Dobrik and Liza Koshy, Childish Gambino‘s This is America and the many versions of that, the owners of DaddyOFive channel losing custody of their kids, and maybe Logan Paul’s infamous video and the aftermath at Aokigahara forest in Japan, or even the slime addiction, among other things! But none of these show up in YouTube Rewind 2018.

The video does address the issue of mental health with Superwoman-fame Lily Singh walking in, however that too just on the surface.

YouTube Rewind 2018 has played safe with only the creators that have kept out of any sort of controversies this year while missing out on a lot of people and things viewers actually talked about this year. And I am not the only one who thinks so.

The open hostility towards the video is quite evident in the more than 1.4 million downvotes in the video (at the time of writing the story) as compared to the 746,000 likes that it got.

Even on Twitter, a lot of users shared a not-so-pleasant response to the video.

This is not to say that YouTube totally missed the mark. It got the popular mukbang videos, which was a trending food challenge of 2018, there are references to conversations about creator burnout (read: the mention of Lily Singh above) and of course Fortnite.